Monday Musings: There’s Aamir’s Paani Foundation and there’s Pune’s Paani Mafia

All the good work being done by Aamir Khan’s Paani Foundation and other Good Samaritans is being washed away by Pune’s Paani Mafia.

Recently, the prominent politician Sharad Pawar met superstar Aamir Khan in Pune after lauding his work on water conservation through the Paani Foundation. As Pawar said, Aamir has indeed turned the work of water conservation in rural areas into a people’s movement.

Water tanker illegally fills water from a punctured PMC water tank at Wadgaonsheri. (Sanket Wankhade/HT PHOTO)

There is Paani Foundation at one end and there is Pune’s Paani Mafia at the other end which is thriving on the exploitation of thousands of residents by starving them of water. Hundreds of housing societies and commercial establishments in newly-emerged and emerging localities, such as Kondhwa, Undri, Kharadi, Vimannagar, Wakad, Hinjewadi and Punawale among others, are being forced to purchase water from the tanker mafia. Without any reliable source of municipal water, many are also purchasing processed drinking water in 20-litre jars at ₹50 each.

As exposed by Hindustan Times over the last few days, this mafia works hand-in-glove with water tanker operators, officials and staff of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and the builders lobby. It is well known that all of this is with the blessings of politicians.

Our investigative reports have exposed how Pune’s water mafia has acquired a firm grip on the water business in the city and runs a well-oiled racket running upwards of ₹100 crore per annum.

There is absolutely no meaningful control or supervision from the PMC or the state government in Maharashtra in ensuring fair and equitable distribution of water in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.

This mafia has managed to ensure un-metered supply of lakhs of litres of potable water per day from PMC’s water tanker filling stations, daily theft of thousands of litres of processed drinking water and other public sources, cartelisation of water supply rates, harassment of housing societies which try to fight exploitation by water tanker operators, destruction of CCTV cameras at water-filling stations and refusal to allow GPS/GPRS systems to track the movement of water tankers.

It is not just the residents who are at the mercy of this mafia, but even IAS officers heading the municipal corporations and other agencies, have been found to be incapable of dealing firmly with this mafia. At the same time, there is a lot that well-meaning IAS officers like the new municipal commissioner of Pune, Saurabh Rao, can do for the city.

With complete support and endorsement from the residents of Pune, the municipal commissioners must begin using information technology (IT) to bring in transparency in water supply and distribution.

Start by installing electronic tamper-proof flow meters at the water tanker filling stations. Make installation of GPRS tracking systems mandatory in water tankers plying in the city. Identify and penalise illegal tapping of water by the tanker mafia. Begin with these three steps and then proceed to take other measures to achieve the goal of equitable distribution of water.

Any officer who is able to rein in the mafia will be blessed by this city, and of course, this newspaper will wholeheartedly support and applaud all such efforts.

abhay.vaidya@htlive.com